The Insider News

Zack’s Blog[^]:

Adherence to DRY (“Don’t Repeat Yourself”) does not necessarily preclude repetition of code. In the endless struggle to refactor, the entropy we are trying to reduce is not in the raw text of our source code; it is in our business logic, which (in applications with little or poor testing) is often uncodified. Sometimes, refactoring can hamstring our code, and when done naïvely it can be a source of technical debt, rather than an antidote thereto.

profserious[^]:

If you are not a computer scientist most of these people will, almost certainly, be unknown to you. Sadly the popular drinking game 'name that computer scientist' is, for you, over quickly. This may not seem a big problem but I would wish to argue otherwise. The scientists below have set out the foundations of our digital world. Their work is beautiful and important. It is furthermore, of the highest cultural significance spanning the boundaries of mathematics, engineering, psychology and the natural sciences. It is what we computer scientists aspire to.

BuzzFeed[^]:

Facebook wants an awful lot from its emoticons: They should be able to convey complex emotions, for example, like contemplation, admiration, affirmation, maternal love, determination, devotion, resignation, and gratitude. But how, in a tiny digital image, do you depict something as subtle as shame as opposed to remorse, or shyness as opposed to modesty? Current emoticons can't do that, or anything close to it. So Facebook has turned to Pixar story illustrator and former storyboard artist at the Wallace and Gromit studio Matt Jones, to help make something entirely new. He's charged, basically, with reinventing the smiley.

The Register[^]:

Today, Nginx offers fewer features than Apache, but its performance is significantly higher. In this way, it's not unlike MySQL or NoSQL in the database market, or JBoss and Tomcat in the application server market, or any number of other open source examples where the open-source alternative is initially feature-constrained but significantly better for a particular purpose. Over time, it adds functionality and continues to improve performance until, like Linux in the server and mobile operating system markets, it dominates.

ZDNet[^]:

Microsoft has been pummeled by critics this week over supposedly inadequate storage space in its new Surface Pro. But those criticisms are horribly flawed. Big surprise: when you do the disk space math, Surface Pro and MacBook Air are practically twins.

Russell Beattie[^]:

No, there's only one area where Android falls really, horribly, undeniably short when it comes to the tablet form factor: The web browser. It's the most fundamental tablet app, IMHO, and yet the web experience on Android could not possibly be worse. I honestly have no idea how this is possible.